The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History

Trump is trying to whitewash America’s past. Could rebellion offer a
brighter future?By Nick Turse

I’ve lived through the last 51 of America’s 250 years. For much of it, I’ve
believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never
quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of
vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it
deserves to be. It’s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past,
and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.

Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim
Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on
innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality
of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed
women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a
country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always
stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original
sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many
other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome
such a legacy.

A few examples of American "greatness" -

   - Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district, led
   more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on
   November 29, 1864. In what he called “an act of duty to ourselves and to
   civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on a sleeping
   village at Sand Creek
   <https://theintercept.com/2024/11/28/army-native-american-heritage-month/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept>.
   For almost four hours, they slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds
   of them women and children. Many Native women were also raped, and Native
   American scalps, breasts, and genitalia
   <https://books.google.com/books?id=c8VVDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT87&dq=%22sand+creek%22+scalps,genitalia+and+fingers+smithsonian&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLisTHhPiJAxVLGFkFHfCJM4wQ6AF6BAgLEAI#v=onepage&q=%22sand%20creek%22%20scalps%2Cgenitalia%20and%20fingers%20smithsonian&f=false>were
   taken as souvenirs. In a letter
   <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/custer-one-indian-outbreaks/> to
   Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington stated: “It may, perhaps, be
   unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and
   six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”
   - In 1914, striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek
   Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security company
   opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car that the
   miners called “the Death Special
   <https://digital.denverlibrary.org/nodes/view/1131280>.” Those miners
   fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson
   ordered in federal troops. Almost 200 people were killed, according to some
   estimates.
   - A two-day attack by white mobs on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district
   in 1921 began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching.
   Rioting white people, in response, killed hundreds, and more than 30 city
   blocks were destroyed, including a community known as Black Wall
Street. Viola
   Ford Fletcher
   <https://eji.org/news/justice-department-finds-tulsa-massacre-was-a-coordinated-military-style-attack/>,
   a survivor, recalled piles of bodies in the streets and watched a white man
   execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
   - During the 20th century, coerced and forced sterilization became a
   method of controlling “undesirable” populations: disabled people,
   immigrants, people of color, the poor, unmarried mothers, those with mental
   illness, and others. This included federally funded sterilization programs
   in 32 states. Over 70 years in California, for example, approximately
   20,000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions, often without
   their full consent.
   - From 1932 to 1972, 399 black men, many of them sharecroppers and poor,
   in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from
   the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study.
   Despite the availability of penicillin beginning in the 1940s and the fact
   that syphilis can damage the heart, brain, and other organs, government
   officials ensured the men received no medical care while telling them they
   were being treated for “bad blood.” 128 of the men
   <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/12/20/magazine/peter-buxtun-tuskegee-study.html>
are
   estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications.
   - In a horrifying echo of the Tuskegee syphilis study, U.S. government
   and Guatemalan doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected more than 1,300
   Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and sex workers with
   three sexually-transmitted infections — chancroid, gonorrhea, and syphilis
   — to study potential treatments. The researchers also paid sex workers to
   transmit the diseases. Left untreated, all three can be fatal.
   - The U.S. government conducted thousands of radiation experiments on
   Americans, including children, from 1944 to 1974. They included
   <https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/22/us/thousands-of-human-experiments.html>
the
   injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake
   of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air
   to track their movement or effects.
   - U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not
   hundreds of thousands of rapes in Europe during and after World War II.
   Around 190,000 German women alone were raped between the U.S invasion of
   Nazi Germany and 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty,
   according to one estimate. In reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the
   summer of 1945, the youngest victim mentioned was a 7-year-old child. The
   oldest was a woman in her 60s.
   - On August 6, 1945, the U.S. launched the world’s first nuclear attack
   on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Around 70,000
   <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/books/review/fallout-hiroshima-hersey-lesley-m-m-blume.html>
people,
   nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or
   irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon
   after. As many as 280,000
   <https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-reporter-who-revealed-the-truth-about-hiroshima/2020/08/06/bed947e0-c7a4-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html>
were
   dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. An atomic strike
   on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as
   many as 70,000.
   - The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program targeted the civil rights
   movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among others in
   the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1976 Senate
   <https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-94755-iii.pdf>
    report
   <https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-94755-iii.pdf>,
   it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the
   committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret
   action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and
   individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be
   intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been
   involved in violent activity,” which they were not.
   - On March 15, 1968 in South Vietnam, U.S. troops were briefed by their
   commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina. The Americans were told they would
   find enemy troops in the village of My Lai and, as one unit member
   recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” When the
   troops arrived, they encountered only civilians: women, children, and old
   men. Nonetheless, Medina’s order was carried out. More than 500 civilians
   were slaughtered over the course of four hours. The soldiers even took a
   break to eat lunch amid the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women
   and young girls, mutilated the dead, and systematically burned homes.

*https://theintercept.com/2026/07/04/july-4-america-250-trump/
<https://theintercept.com/2026/07/04/july-4-america-250-trump/>*


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